Mera Apna Sheher (My Own City) (Sameera Jain, India, 2011, 70 min.)

What role does gender play in public space? Is there a way to reimagine and reclaim the city as a place of equality for women and men? How can we reveal female subjugation, which is so deeply embedded in the terrain of cities and the logic of our culture? Mera Apna Sheher (My Own City) (2011) is a film by Sameera Jain that attempts to confront these difficult questions. The film depicts the city as a contested terrain where conflicting emotions of belonging and alienation, anxiety and comfort, freedom and control come together.

Participants: Shilpa Phadke, writer and assistant professor at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences; Surabhi Sharma, moderator; Prasad Shetty, urbanist and city official, Mumbai Metropolitan Region–Environment Improvement and Heritage Conservation Society, and teacher, Rachana Sansad’s Academy of Architecture in Mumbai.